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Off-Broadway can be a punishing place for a composer/lyricist making his New York debut. Since Sondheim's canonization in the 1970s, only three (in my estimation) produced exceptional debut musicals: William Finn (In Trousers), Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins), and Stew (Passing Strange). Michael R. Jackson must now be added to this rarified list. His musical A Strange Loop represents an audacious and astonishing feat. A piece about a fat, black queer man writing a musical about a fat, black queer man who is writing a musical about …, Loop is an autobiographical mise en abyme that nests anguish in exhilaration and vice-versa. Given its relentless metatheatricality, it also intrepidly takes on the New York theatre industry and entertainment more broadly (The Lion King and Tyler Perry are repeatedly dissed). Like so many of the most adventurous musicals, Loop eschews a linear, chronological narrative in favor of a theme and variations–type structure that keeps looping back on itself, and most of its songs function as operatic scenas, each with its own subject, dramaturgy, and repeated refrain.
The Playwrights Horizons production, directed by Stephen Brackett, featured seven gifted and dedicated performers who gleefully took on the many roles in a musical that Jackson describes in the liner notes to the CD issue as "too raw, too edgy, too queer, and too black to ever allow it on the stage." First among equals was the thrillingly intrepid Larry Owens, who played...